Pages

Friday, March 11, 2016

Contributing Artist - 100 McCaul Lobby

Ana Jofre

In this interactive datavisualization, members of the audience will have access to a keyboardon which they can enter a search term. Thescriptwill first scrape Twitter for recent tweets containing the search term entered by the user. These tweets will be displayed onscreen ina streaming format. Ifthe user doesnot enter a new term in that time, this is where it gets interesting. The script will then identify the most common term in the initial scraped tweets andwill doa second twitter scrape to output alltweetsthat share this new second term. This process will reiterate with subsequent terms until a new term is entered into the keyboard. I am curious about where each initial search term will go conceptually as the code iterates.

The experience of this work is intended to simulateimportant facets of the experience oflinkingthrough articles online—sometimes one will end upin a very unrelated place after a few iterations, whereas other searches take us into more detailon ouroriginal topic.The projectinterrogates our intuitions about the internet’s connection to distractibility,short attentionspans,roving curiosity, and even the open-minded receptivity to new information.It also speakstothe rapidity ofthe evolution of information.

Ana Jofre received her PhD in Physics from the University of Toronto, did Post-doctoral workat NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) inGaithersburgMD, and taught at theUniversity of North Carolina in Charlotte for six years before transitioning her career towards the arts. She has recentlycompleted herMFA atOCADUniversity in Toronto.Her publicationsand conference presentations covera widerange of intellectual interests, from physics tocultural studies, and she hasexhibited her artwork extensively. Her current creative and research interests include figurative sculpture, the uncanny, puppetry, robotics, embodiment,and data visualization. She iscurrently a post-doctoral research fellow at OCAD Universityin the visual analyticslab.

For more information or to contact the artist: http://onewomancaravan.net/index.html

Monday, February 22, 2016

Sean Martindale is an internationally recognized interdisciplinary artist and designer currently based in Toronto, Canada. His interventions activate public and semi-public spaces to encourage engagement, often focused on ecological and social issues. His playful works question and suggest alternate possibilities for existing spaces, infrastructures and materials found in urban environments. Frequently, Martindale uses salvaged goods and live plants in unexpected ways that prompt conversations and interaction.

Martindale’s projects have been featured on countless prominent sites online, as well as in traditional media such as print, radio, broadcast television and film. His practice has a global following and has been written about in countries all around the world, and in multiple languages. Martindale was profiled for the first episode of the CBC’s Great Minds of Design, one of his lectures was filmed by TVO for their Big Ideas series, and his work was also included in the feature-length documentary This Space Available, released in 2011.

The Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts (TFVA) awarded Martindale their prestigious Artist Prize for 2012, and thee Ontario Arts Council granted him a Chalmers Arts Fellowship in 2013. He holds an MFA from the Interdisciplinary Master’s of Art, Media and Design program at OCAD University in Toronto, and a Bachelor of Design from Emily Carr University in Vancouver. He was the Decennial Hancock Lecturer at the University of Toronto’s Hart House where his work was on view in 2011. Martindale has taken part in multiple solo and group exhibitions, and his projects have been shown in cities such as Montreal, Madrid, New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Shenszhen, Victoria, Vancouver, Venice, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Oxford, London England, Las Vegas, Charlottetown, St John’s, Minneapolis, Paris, Angers, Brussels, Berlin and Doha. 2012 marked the opening of NOW, Martindale’s major two-person show with Pascal Paquette at the Art Gallery of Ontario as part of the AGO’s Toronto Now contemporary project series, and he has since exhibited work multiple times at the gallery. His work has also been seen in such places as The Royal Ontario Museum for Hot Docs, at Toronto’s City Hall for Asian Heritage Month, in Montreal for Art Souterrain / Nuit Blanche 2013, and in St John’s Newfoundland for the Art Marathon Festival 2013. Also in 2013, he was the lead artist on the tallest mural in the world, the result of a community project in St James Town, Toronto, with local youth, STEPS and the Toronto Muralists. Sean has continued to lead other notable community arts projects, and has also taken part in a number of residencies. Among recent projects was Martindale’s major installation outside City Hall for Nuit Blanche Toronto 2015, including integrated video collaborations with JP King.

Janaya Khan, known as Future in the Black Lives Matter movement, is a black, queer, gender-nonconforming activist, staunch Afrofuturist, social-justice educator and boxer based in Toronto. As the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Toronto, they are committed to black liberation, transformative justice and indigenous sovereignty and operate through a black transfeminist lens. They have previously been featured in the Feminist Wire and RaceBaitR and can be found shutting it down at an action near you.

Geographical, ideological and cultural ‘fringes’ having shaped much of the twenty-first century’s speculative imaginary and its imagery. Philosophy, art and design have experienced a bursting open of ontological parameters and a surge towards hybridized methodologies. The digitized space of the Internet, which has powerfully influenced these trends is also considered to be a space without border or periphery, where the ‘fringe,’ practices and ideologies of the analog world are able to blossom. This panel looks at such peripheral philosophies and art forms: flickering post-human ontologies, new-media sound art, and tomb design.

Social media provides many tools for constructing digitized yet fully formed online selves. With an influx of self-photographing, self-documenting and self-surveillence technologies, to what extent are our digital avatars both genuine and constructed? How are these identities formed and what are the implications of this online performativity? Responding to questions of age, gender, privacy and beauty through examining artists such as Petra Collins, YouTube make-up tutorials and the discursive trend towards ‘self care,’ this panel looks at how these new considerations of the ‘self’ are affecting visual culture.

12:30 - 1:30 pm Lunch

1:45 - 2 pm Performance: First Things First

Christopher Lacroix

afallenhorse

2 - 3:30 pm The Word Made Digital

Moderated by Katie ConnellFan WuMary C. Baumstark

Merray Gerges

As communication via devices becomes ubiquitous, the notion that ‘words are sacred’ is increasingly both a cliché and an untruth. This panel is designed to trouble this notion through interrogating the influence of new media on writing and speaking. With a publishing industry in upheaval, as well as online dissemination of philosophy and viral sharing, writing can be metareflective of these shifts. Words, and our ability to choose the right ones, are extremely important to us when expressing and asserting ourselves in moments of both marginalization and empowerment.

News spreads rapidly and in myriad forms of new media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and blogs are but a few deterritorialized news sources. Additionally, these online forums have become critical sites for the proliferation and explosion of both grass roots activism and international movements. #BlackLivesMatter, #IdleNoMore, #KillBillC51 and the Syrian refugee crisis have taken shape on social media, organizing and inspiring pivotal protests amongst bodies in public spaces. Yet social media has also resulted in both corporatized activism and what has been popularly decried as ‘slacktivism’ – an online attendance to politically charged protests, marches and gartherings that is not physically carried out. This panel interrogates the digital sides of activism, hegemony and the popular media responding to it: surveillance technologies, television and hashtags.

6 - 7:30 Keynote Speaker: Janaya Khan

Opening remarks from Dr. Andrea Fatona (CADN)

7 - 10 pm Opening Reception: #nature

Artwork by featured artist Sean Martindale

OCADU Graduate Gallery at 205 Richmond

The 2016 CADN Graduate Conference at OCAD U is dedicated to the perspectives of emerging scholars. The interdisciplinary all-ages conference will promote an open space for dialogue about the art historical, socio-cultural and political trends of the contemporary moment. We hope to foster a welcoming atmosphere that takes into account accessibility, privilege and sustainability thereby encouraging not only inventive and radical conversations during the conference but future collaborations continuing the trend of giving voice to new and exciting ideas.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Presented by the MA Program in Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories at OCAD University, Toronto, Canada

Conference Dates: Saturday, March 12, 2016

The influence of trends is undeniable in contemporary culture, but rarely are its implications fully fleshed out. How can a trend mobilize or call others to action? As scholarship in contemporary art, design and new media becomes increasingly focused on networked lives, the digital platforms through which we communicate, interact, and share information demand academic and social inquiry. This interdisciplinary conference looks to the topic of #trending in its myriad meaningsas it produces and affects subjects and citizenship, social and political change, visual and material culture. We must consider the longevity, impact, and relevancy of cultural work and research as the implications of cultural trends, their makers, and media are nuanced and complex. Are trends disposable or lasting? How should scholarship respond to trends -- by defining them or following them? What can trends tell us in their sequencing, forecasting, and analysis?

Topics for discussion include, but are not limited to:

alternate, sharing and DIY economies

inclusive and locative mobilizations of populations, movements, and narratives

trending as a form of political mediation

artists as activists as artists

viral visual culture & digital storytelling

speculation in the art market

the gentrification of social and artistic spaces

grants and arts awards as trend indicators

curating as trend-setting

the affect and aesthetics of trends

trends, history and the acceleration of culture, theory, criticism

authorship, art practice and online multiplicity

transmedia: podcasts, web series, etc.

the platforms of trend-making: Instagram, twitter, Tumblr, etc.

celebrities as artists/artists as celebrities

We welcome submissions of academic papers, proposed workshops and panels, curatorial proposals, and artistic works, performances, and interventions from MA and PhD students and independent scholars.

Please submit proposals by Friday, November 20, 2015 to cadnconference@ocadu.ca. Accepted candidates will be notified by email.

Proposal/Abstract Deadline: Midnight on Friday, Nov 20, 2015

Final paper due: Midnight on Monday, Feb 1, 2016

Announcement of Acceptance: Thursday, December 10, 2015

What to submit: a 250 word abstract or proposal, a short biography, and, if needed, an url for up to five (5) images and/or five (5) minutes of video. Please submit texts as .doc or .pdf files.

SESSION DESCRIPTIONS

9 - 10:30 AM: SESSION GROUP ONE

Session Description: This panel gathers presentations that seek to destabilize and traverse cultural and disciplinary boundaries from a variety of perspectives. Amy Beingessner points to the construction and reconstruction of the myths of cohesive identities, speaking particularly to question efforts to reproduce notions of authenticity for the making of cultural heritage. Building upon this line of questioning, Soheila Esfahani and Gregory Elgstrand open up the spaces between multiple cultures and disciplines as new sites of knowledge production that are receptive to subjective imagination and improvisation.

Rm 7301 PANEL 2Performativity
Moderated by Marianne Fenton

Shauna Janssen Victoria Mohr-Blakeney

Session Description: This panel considers performativity as a strategy, a method and an outcome through an investigation of specific art and curatorial practices. Shauna Janssen will consider the notion of “performing encounters” through a consideration of her own, situated, curatorial practice. Victoria Mohr- Blakeney interrogates performance through the medium of dance. Her investigation addresses related concerns of the archive, memory, space and issues around the re-performance of dance.

Workshop Description: Easily overlooked, the doodle turns up
wherever more deliberate marks are made, often finding its home in marginal
spaces. It is tempting to classify it as a cousin to the sketch, or a kind of
precursor to the cartoon, but the doodle resists comparison to other forms of
visual culture, always at the periphery of art, craft and writing.

Combining theory and practice, “Doodling in
the Margins” explores the ways in which typically unassuming, marginal, and
indistinct marks relate to the well-defined disciplines whose peripheral spaces
they often inhabit. A short talk will introduce a series of practical doodling exercises,
including:

·Bad Doodles

·A Quick Lesson in Simplified
Doodling

·Doodles as Criticism

·Doodling Toward a Future
Project

To contextualize these and other exercises,
the workshop will invite participants to consider a wide range of instructive
examples, among them: the marginalia in medieval codices, Hokusai’s 1812 manual
Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing,
Richard Serra’s preparatory doodles, choreographic diagrams from contemporary
dance, and the sketchbook work of cartoonist Kate Beaton.

The hallmark of the doodle is its lack of
cultivation, its status as an index of idle gesture and involuntary energy.
Though it does not require any training and rarely aspires to art, it is
frequently part of an artist’s process. It can be iconic, indexical, symbolic,
purely expressive, or some indefinable combination of modes – ultimately, the
doodle is an instance of mark-making at its most elemental.

10:30 - 12 Noon: SESSION GROUP TWO

Session Description: The presenters on this panel speak to the questions of process and response when layers and acts of production are engaged. Most especially, they are asking what we do when we encounter whatever it is we encounter when we are in between known practices—when there is an exchange afoot of an indistinguishable quality yet active as an amalgam. A matter of (de)materiality and performance, of objective and reflexive entanglement, of politics and aesthetics, the negotiations are at play with a multiplicity of potentials and the fluid power of interpretability. Of critique, of protocol, of expectation, whether they emerge from institutional settings, ritual, affective response… the analysis of relations of power are inherent to all engagement as a meeting or a blending of forces. To move within a context of autonomy and its implausibility, where co-option is a rule not the exception, to break from power or to at least to disrupt dominance these projects encourage readings and re-readings of a dynamics of differentiation.

Session Description: Arriving from various personal and disciplinary perspectives, Kendra Ainsworth, Deborah Margo, and Geneviève Wallen will discuss the roles and responsibilities of participants within and surrounding the contemporary art discourse. Occupying multiple roles that include those of an artist, curator, writer, educator, student, settler, and/or gardener, their interests are centered around the relationship between the identity and positionality of cultural producers and their contribution to the public discourse of art and culture. This open roundtable discussion is aimed at exploring and questioning the place of personal identities within cross-cultural dialogues.

Workshop description: This workshop presents the Comics History Special Collection and the Donald F. Theall Special Collection as part of Siroyt's project, the Mobile Special Collections and Rare Books Reading Room. The aim of the workshop is to discuss the interplay of disciplines, art forms, and fields of study, using the books in the collection to explore the themes of the conference. The workshop begins with an overview of the scope of the collection, including a display of some of the selected items included in the installation. From the Comics Collection this includes original comic artwork by cartoonists such as Charles Burns, Chris Ware, Seth, Chester Brown, Adrian Tomine, & Marc Bell, and rare & relevant comic books from the Comics History Special Collection, some of which prominently features the town of Strathroy. From the Donald Theall Special Collection this includes Theall's annotated copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and many other relevant titles that demonstrate his devotion to interdisciplinary study. Theall was a professor at University of Toronto, President of Trent University, and a colleague of Marshall McLuhan. His work explored avant-garde media concepts, and he published a book titled “The Virtual Marshall McLuhan” and a book called “James Joyce’s Technopoetics”.

On hand will be cartooning supplies such as pigment liners of varying widths, brush pens, paper, etc. and the workshop will conclude with participants creating comic work under specific parameters responding to the holdings of these collections, pulling images and text from them to generate comic-literary work that demonstrates the themes discussed. This workshop aims to upset the traditional notion of the rare books reading room as a staid space in which the holdings sit dormant. Here it is dynamic and generative, flexible and mobile, and contravenes traditional museum policies by installing a Rare Books and Special Collections Reading Room on-site at the conference.

1 - 2:30 PM: SESSION GROUP THREE

Rm 7320 PANEL 4Glitch Glitch
Moderated by Sam Strong

Marcin KedziorNick White

Session Description: A glitch disrupts the normal functioning of a code system. Glitch Art embraces the visual style of the glitch for various conceptual and aesthetic reasons. Increasingly, theorists are turning to the analysis of glitch and glitch art as a productive failure that challenges existing systems and strategies of organization in the digital age. This panel, featuring presentations that critique and rework the contemporary study of glitch art, might be thought of as a glitching of glitch. The papers presented here share an interest in rethinking glitch theory and the possibilities that glitch art offer.

Rm 7301 PANEL 5(Re)Viewing the Gaze
Moderated by Brittany Higgens

Frances DorenbaumJulia HavardJamie Ranger

Session Description: From the notion of the Lacanian ‘gaze’, this panel aims to explore contemporary mechanisms of reviewing, returning, and subverting this ‘gaze’ in art practice. Frances Dorenbaum, Julia Havard and Jamie Ranger will speak to acts of witnessing and the ethics of spectatorship as audiences are confronted with the marginalized body in contemporary photography and performance art. Their presentations will enable discussion of how artists invite, control, combat, or reflect awareness of the gaze, be it male, colonial, and/or sexualized encounter.

Workshop description: Is there an ekphrastic impulse at the heart of criticism and aesthetic theory, a desire to describe objects of interest and rematerialize art? The Contemporary Poetry Research Group (CPRG) seeks to explore this question in a workshop designed to break down or permeate the relationship between spectators and art objects. In doing so, the project suggests ways that writing might intervene and transform art objects into critical feedback mechanisms. The workshop embraces ekphrasis’ fundamental fusion of writing and art, but also inverts, interrogates and moves beyond this traditional descriptive relationship between art object and textual mediation. Following an introduction of the potential for ekphrasis as a critical mode of engaging with art, the workshop will present a series of practical exercises designed to facilitate collaboration between visual artists and poets/writers. Participants are invited to bring existing material, but will also be encouraged to generate new individual and collaborative work through the exercises.

2:30 - 4 PM: SESSION GROUP FOUR

with Brendan Fernandes, Keynote Performance presenter and a nationally and internationally recognised Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent.

Alison Cooley Shauna JanssenVictoria Mohr-Blakeney

Session Description: Brendan Fernandes’ interdisciplinary practice considers identity as in-process and transitional. His more recent works (of which Encomium is an example) continues this investigation, but through the medium of dance. In Encomium, multiple disciplinary practices intersect in the gallery space as text, linguistic devices (morse code), space, dance, performance, and the body all work towards a queering that is activated through a practice of art’s edges. Translation and embodiment as queering methodologies become a part of both the investigative tools and outcomes. Our three participants will use his work as an anchor from which they will consider the productive overlapping, situating angles of sight and the sensorial, citation and the referential, and the site in space, place, and time as expressed through the medium of performance art.

Session Description: The panel will open up questions and discussion about the adoption of the unintended, the out-of-place, and the easily overlooked as viable methodological processes for meaningful, productive and perfectly imperfect boundary making. These processes represent interventions into established academic institutions and, often through experimentation and play, disrupt existing conceptions of what it means to do intellectual work.

Session Description: As the final session of Multiple Li(v)es of Art/ists &... we invite all conference participants and attendees to join us for a roundtable plenary. This roundtable will consist of scholars selected from OCAD University’s esteemed Graduate Studies faculty. Faculty members have been chosen for their respective expertise in disciplines including art history, curating, design, performance and new media studies. The roundtable members will respond to the day’s discussions, facilitated by questions and comments collected in a ballot boxes throughout the conference proceedings. This session will act as a concluding discussion on pertinent threads and concerns surrounding “art’s edges” as foregrounded by conference participants and attendees.